As time goes by: Turkey’s role in Syria’s unfolding crisis

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the book “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In the period 2010-11, he wrote op-eds for Today’s Zaman and in the further course of 2011 he also published a number of pieces in Hürriyet Daily News. In 2013, he was the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. He is on Twitter at @theerimtanangle

Turkish riot police use tear gas to disperse Turkish-Kurd protesters demonstrating on the Turkish side as Syrian Kurds gather on the other side of the border in Mardin's Nusaybin district on November 7, 2013.(AFP Photo) / AFP

Under Erdogan Turkey became directly involved in the Syrian crisis as his support for the Muslim Brotherhood brought an ideological context to Turkey’s hostile stance against Assad’s government.

At the beginning of 2011, continuing protests against Assad
finally led to the end of the 48-year state of emergency in Syria
and an amnesty for political prisoners, not without US and EU
pressure. But several months later a well-known US whistleblower
Sibel Edmondsclaimed that the US and Turkey have been giving
logistic aid and military training to the Syrian armed opposition
since “April-May 2011”. Edmonds even declared that the
US Air Force base in İncirlik (Turkey) was used as a training
facility for the so-called Free Syrian Army and other opponents
of the Damascus regime – in her own words, “the dissident
base in Syria.”

In March 2011 protesters in Damascus and the
southern city of Deraa demanded the release of political
prisoners, detained under the strict emergency rule in force
since 1963. In response, the Assad regime started a campaign of
mass arrests, imprisoning a wide cross section of society,
including community leaders, imams and students.

Still, Assad appeared willing to be conciliatory and released
dozens of political prisoners and even dismissed his own
government. In April 2011 he lifted the state
of emergency that had lasted for almost half a century.
Nevertheless, about a month later, army tanks entered the towns
of Deraa, Banyas, Homs and the suburbs of Damascus in an effort
to violently suppress any anti-regime protests.

After the crackdown on protesters, in May 2011
the US administration and the European Union tightened their
sanctions against Assad. In turn, he announced the amnesty for
political prisoners.

In June 2011, the Assad government declared that 120 members of
its security forces were killed by “armed gangs” in the
northwestern town of Jisr al-Shughour, located about 16 kilometers
from Turkey’s Hatay region. Assad’s troops laid siege to the town
and more than 10,000 people subsequently fled to Turkey.

Since then reports have surfaced that Libyan fighters from
Misrata went to Syria in an effort to support attempts to
overthrow Assad. In addition, rumors equally abounded about Saudi
Arabia and Qatar’s mobilization of jihadist fighters to undermine
the Baath regime in Syria. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan has been vocal in his condemnation of
Bashar al-Assad, ever since the outbreak of hostilities in Syria.

In spite of the Turkish government’s current belligerent stance
on the Damascus regime – be it in the form of a “covert”
war or as providing mere “logistic aid and military
training” – in the early years of its AKP government,
“Turkey proved instrumental in breaking Syria’s international
isolation, which paved the way for Assad’s visit to France in
2005. In 2007, a free trade agreement between Turkey and Syria
boosted the bilateral trade volume from $796 million in 2006 to
$2.5 billion in 2010. In 2008, Turkey even brokered peace talks
between Syria and Israel. While the following year, Ankara and
Damascus abolished the visa regime, thus far hampering the free
movement of people and products between both countries.”

As a result, one can but wonder about the reasons behind
Erdoğan’s sudden change of heart. These political interactions
took place against the backdrop of Turkey’s growing economic
clout. Turkey was quite successful on the international front,
promulgating Foreign Minister Davutoğlu’s principle of "strategic depth" and his much-vaunted
“zero problems policy”. In 2010, I
described this pragmatic policy of Turkey as “pseudo-Ottoman”, as a political
means of maximizing its economic clout in the region and beyond.
In this context of Turkey’s increased economic stature, Turkey’s
forays into Pipelineistan, by means of the projected
Nabucco Pipeline, appeared under threat from
a venture by Iran, Iraq and significantly Syria. Syria’s civil
war then seemed like a fortunate obstruction, ensuring the
success of Turkey’s designs to thwart Russia’s energy hold on the
EU. Since then, however, the Nabucco project has been sidestepped
by the operators of the Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea
(BP, Total, Statoil and SOCAR). This economic plot might provide
a practical reason for the Turkish Prime Minister’s sudden change
of heart.

Beyond such purely pragmatic grounds, Syria’s beleaguered
president has suggested a distinctly ideological motive for
Tayyip Erdoğan’s unexpected enmity. In an interview given by
Bashar al-Assad last October, conducted by the Turkish
journalist, Ece Zereycan, and broadcast on the Turkish television
channel, Halk TV, he described his earlier cordial relations with
the Turkish prime minister, concluding that the latter’s support
for the Muslim Brotherhood caused the Turkish state to become an
enemy of Syria, while maintaining that the Syrian people are
still very fond of Turkey and its people. Bashar al-Assad
believes that the Turkish PM, as a Sunni Muslim, who is arguably
pursuing a policy of sunnification domestically, has become
allied with his Sunni opponents.

Assad, as a member of the Allawite branch of the Twelver school
of Shia Islam (a group representing about 12 percent of Syria’s
overall population), opposes the Muslim Brotherhood. They, in
turn, harbor a special hostility towards Syria’s president, as
his father Hafez al-Assad had at least 10,000 people massacred
in response to their calls for mass uprisings against the
Damascus government in 1982.

The French intellectual, Thierry Meyssan, for his part, is even more
outspoken on this topic. Meyssan calls the “Muslim
Brotherhood, a secret organization that Erdogan and his team have
always been affiliated to, despite their denials”. And in
effect, as a pious believer and self-proclaimed Muslim Democrat,
Tayyip Erdoğan has been more than outspoken in his support for
the Brotherhood, particularly praising the fifth president of
Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, and strongly condemning his removal from
office on 3 July 2013 by the “coup that is not a coup”
led by General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi.

Edmonds’ [US whistleblower] claims that Turkey under Erdoğan is
directly involved in the Syria crisis were apparently confirmed
in 2012 when Eric Schmitt published his scoop in the New
York Times. In his piece, Schmitt wrote that a “small number
of CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey,
helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the
border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government”.
Elaborating on his claim, Schmitt added that these “weapons,
including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition
and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the
Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries
including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey,
Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” [unnamed American] officials said.
In addition to the counties listed, Germany’s involvement was
also made public last year. According to the German tabloid
newspaper, Bild am Sonntag, (and confirmed by the reputable der
Spiegel), Angela Merkel’s government dispatched the 84-metre long
naval service ship, Oker, to Syria’s coast. The Oker, which
usually patrols the eastern Mediterranean for NATO, has the
capacity to collect information from locations as deep as 600
kilometers inland: arguably intelligence about Syrian troop
movements, in this case information it can then forward to Syrian
opposition fighters. At the time, US and British spy agencies
also seem to have provided vital information for anti-Assad
forces to be forwarded by the German navy ship.

In fact, Turkey’s greater direct involvement in Syria was then
also confirmed by the news agency, Reuters. From Dubai, Reuters’
Regan Doherty and Amena
Bakrreported that “Turkey has set up a secret
base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military
and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the
border,” citing some Gulf sources. News of the clandestine
Middle East-run ‘nerve center’ working to topple Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad underlines the extent to which Western
powers – who played a key role in unseating Muammar Gaddafi in
Libya – have avoided military involvement so far in Syria. In
this instance, it seems that Reuters apparently forgot that
Turkey is part and parcel of the Western alliance as a NATO
member and close friend of the US. Or is it that only Israel, as
an imported nation state in the Middle East, can be publicly
termed a member of the Western powers? Nevertheless, Doherty and
Bakr’s story clearly shows that Turkey was stepping out of the
shadows and publicly assumed a leading role in the mission to
topple the Syrian Baath regime.

On the verge of military invasion

Turkey has been close to intervening militarily on a number of
occasions, in response to provocations that could arguably be
described as false-flag operations.

In late 2012, a civilian home in the Turkish border town of
Akçakale was apparently attacked by the Syrian army. And rumors of
Turkish troops entering the fray immediately started flying
about, but in the end, Turkey settled for firing a number of
mortar rounds into Syrian territory. After it transpired that the
attack did not constitute a sufficient casus belli [grounds for
war] for Turkey, the German media station ZDF (Heute in Europa or
‘Today in Europe’) even reported that Syrian
“rebels” attacked a Turkish border town. The Turkish
government took revenge for the attack and simply shot back, a
retaliation which, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights, resulted in the death of three Syrian soldiers.

Earlier this year, another provocation occurred in the small
border town of Reyhanlı, also known as “little
Syria” locally. Two deadly bomb blasts rocked the town,
killing at least 51 people and injuring 140. The Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdoğan immediately seized the opportunity to
issue war-like threats and conjure up an atmosphere of imminent
hostilities, similar to the situation in 1999 when Turkey had
also threatened Syria with war on account of Damascus harboring
the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öçalan. In response to the Reyhanlı attack,
Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç even stated that Syria’s
“Mukhabarat[intelligence agency]
and armed organizations are the usual suspects in planning and
carrying out such devilish plans”, clearly laying the blame
at Assad’s doorstep.

Still, it seems puzzling why the Syrian regime would perpetrate
such a heinous act. And then, Turkey’s Interior Minister Muammer Güler held a press conference, declaring
that “For the time being there is no evidence suggesting that
Al-Qaida was involved.” Still, Erdoğan held firm: “These
attacks betray the intention of a country on fire which is trying
to drag Turkey into the same fire. These attacks, to put it
bluntly, are the bloody Baath regime’s attempt to provide an
opportunity to its collaborators... These attacks aim to provoke
those who live together in peace, in serenity, in fraternity,
particularly inHatay. Most importantly, these attacks
target Turkey which has resolved its terror issue, reinforced
fraternity, put an end to mothers’ tears,” adding that
“This incident is definitely connected to the [Syrian]
regime. The [Syrian] regime is behind this incident. That is
evident.”

At the time Turkey was prepared to go to war, but first, Tayyip
Erdoğan met with US President Barrack Obama, and, as
I then wrote “prior to boarding his States-bound flight he
announced to the nation that, upon his return, things would be
very different”. Erdoğan seemed particularly keen to impose
a “no-fly-zone”, similar to that in Libya, as he
reiterated during his NBC interview with Ann Curry. During the PM’s
talk with the US president, “Obama emphasized that the US
‘reserves the right’ to attack Syria militarily, in spite of a
deal previously agreed upon with Russia to pursue a negotiated
settlement at a peace conference in Geneva to be held [in June,
and now in January 2014]. Still, Obama insisted that the US would
not attack Syria unilaterally, arguably willing to relegate the
main responsibility to an actor like Turkey as part of a ‘broader
alliance’. Being the consummate statesman that he is, President
Obama said that the US has ‘no magic formula for dealing with an
extraordinary violent and difficult situation like
Syria’s’.” And so, war was once more averted and Turkey did
not send its troops into Syria.

Turkey has nevertheless been active in the pursuit of its Syria
policy, apparently spending more than TL694 million ($386
million) from the Prime Ministry’s discretionary funds to this
end in 2012. These discretionary funds can be used by the Prime
Minister to finance ‘secret intelligence gathering’ and
‘covert operations’ in the pursuit of ‘national
security’ and other ‘high benefits’ of the state,
as worded by Article 24 of the Law regarding Management and
Control of Public Finances. The quoted figure was published by
the Turkish daily Vatan, indicating that over the past ten
years the fund has paid out TL2.866 billion. The fact that last
year’s discretionary spending was nearly double the amount of
2011 (TL 391 million) has led some to argue that these funds must
have been used in furthering Turkey’s goals in Syria. According
to Cem Ertür, affiliated with the independent research and media
organization Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) based in
Montreal, “This fund is financing Turkey’s covert war on
Syria.”

Turkey’s unsuccessful attempts to initiate direct foreign
intervention in Syria have since been made irrelevant by the use
of “chemical weapons” in Syria. The world remembered
President Obama’s reference to a “red line” first
uttered at a press conference in the White House on 20 August
2012. The fact that the Assad regime possessed stockpiles of
these agents became a convenient ploy, particularly following the
Ghouta chemical attack on 21 August 2013.
Even though US Secretary of State John Kerry was immediately
convinced of Assad’s guilt, others have convincingly suggested
that the “rebels” backed by Saudi Arabia’s Director of
National Intelligence, Bandar bin Sultan, bore responsibility for the
attack. The ensuing course of international reaction to the
events appears like a movie script, with CBS correspondent
Margaret Brennan and John Kerry saying that
“[Assad] could turn over every single bit of his chemical
weapons to the international community in the next week” – a
phrase which led to the formulation of a cunning plan by the
Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. Now Assad’s chemical
weapons are in the process of being destroyed and a Geneva-2
peace conference is scheduled for 22 January 2014.

Turkey’s thwarted attempts to play a major role in Syria appear
to have led to its current demotion on the world stage. In
another context, the Turkologist, Andranik Ispiryan, even broadly
spoke of the failure of what I have termed Turkey’s
pseudo-Ottoman ambitions, paraphrasing Davutoğlu’s well-known
dictum as “zero neighbors, multiple problems”. Syrian
refugees fleeing the civil war at home constitute one of these
problems. According to data provided by the UN, Turkey now hosts
more than 600,000 Syrians (from the humble 10,000 two years ago),
compared to approximately 50,000 Syrian asylum applicants for the
whole of the EU. The Turkish government takes its responsibility
towards these refugees very seriously. In a joint effort by the
Turkish Pharmacists’ Association (Türk Eczacıları
Birliği) and the Disaster & Emergency Management
Presidency (Afet ve Acil Durum Yönetimi Başkanlığı or AFAD), the Syrian refugees have been incorporated
into Turkey’s centralized healthcare system, enabling them to
obtain free medication from any pharmacy in the country. Turkey’s
Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı), led by Mehmet Müezzinoğlu, has also applied a
unified system for treating Syrian refugees residing in Turkey’s
bigger provinces: in the first instance, these refugees will be
able to receive free treatment at family health centers. Turkey’s
Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek declared that TL400 million has been
allocated to the care of Syrian refugees currently residing in
Turkey. The government’s care for the Syrian refugees in the
country has led to many concerned voices in Turkey speaking out –
particularly, those opposed to the AKP government and individuals
critical of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As such, a
conspiracy theory even surfaced, claiming that these refugees
were to be given the right to vote in Turkey’s elections, which
would arguably constitute another boost for Erdoğan and his
party. But the Minister of the Interior Muammer Güler issued a
statement in response, indicating that no such plans were afoot
and that, according to the Turkish Citizenship Law, such rapid transfer of
citizenship, which would offer the right to vote, was not
possible.

In the end, one cannot but state that Turkey’s Syria policy has
not led to any happy conclusions and that, in contrast, Turkey’s
standing at home as well as abroad has suffered tremendously. In
view of next year’s scheduled elections, one cannot but wonder
whether the opposition will be able to oust the AKP from its
lofty position, or if the grassroots support enjoyed by Erdoğan
and his cohorts will be sufficient to continue the status quo and
even turn Turkey’s Prime Minister into the country’s President.
Only time will tell.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.